A lifetime creating iconic images from the Lebanese Civil War to the Palestinian struggle has brought both beauty and disillusionment.
“I have been waking up with Israel and sleeping with Israel every single day of my life. And I’m fed up,” says the Lebanese photographer Fouad Elkoury.
After two months of intense bombing of Lebanon by Israel, Elkoury arrived, shaken, in Paris last November. “Each of the wars I’ve lived — in 1967, 1982, 2006 and 2024 — every time, the level of violence increases.”
Elkoury was 15 in 1967, when Israel occupied the entirety of historical Palestine as well as territory in Syria and Egypt. “We had the feeling of being so weak, with a neighbor that was so strong, backed by the number one power,” he says. “It made us believe that life in Lebanon or, indeed, in the Arab world wasn’t worth much.”
In 1972, the Israelis attacked Beirut and killed the Palestinian writer and journalist Ghassan Kanafani. The following year, they killed three PLO officers in their houses in the capital city’s Verdun neighborhood. “We realized collectively very early in the 1970s that everything can disappear, that Lebanon is built on mud.”
It is on this unstable terrain that Elkoury has built his nearly 50-year career, displaying his photographs in the collections of major museums, exhibiting at leading galleries and festivals like the Venice Biennale, authoring or co-authoring 40 books, producing a number of short films and co-founding the Arab Image Foundation. Considered one of the Arab world’s most important photographers, Elkoury is often spoken of as Lebanon’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, a man he met only once, at a 1993 party at the Magnum photo agency. “I saw your pictures,” Elkoury recalls him saying. “They’re very good.”
Finding liminal spaces in war, capturing a ray of light or an unexpected moment suspended in time, Elkoury’s unique style makes his photography timeless. He has retraced a historical journey in Egypt, documented his own loneliness during a trip to Turkey and found poignancy and poetry amid chaos and destruction.
Although Elkoury has spent time photographing countries outside the Middle East, he is best known for his iconic photographs of Yasser Arafat on the boat that ferried him out of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, images of the capital city’s ravaged downtown once the civil war ended, and incisive portraits of Palestinians. His personal and professional involvement with Lebanon and its neighbors remains his foundation, and his home is still in Lebanon. “Palestine and Syria were like a brother and sister in my family,” he says. “Syria, Palestine — or what’s left of it — and Lebanon represent something very strong in my mind because we share the same spoken language, the same food, the same culture, the same climate, the same history. … Now, how the three of us can come to terms with Israel, I don’t know.”
Elkoury’s mother had great pride in her sense of Arabness, and in 1967 she felt a profound loss, he says. He recalls her having the family listen to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s resignation speech. “The Six-Day War was a trauma for her,” says Elkoury.
Although Elkoury began taking photographs when he was a child, he first followed his father’s footsteps and studied architecture, spending time in Yemen for his thesis on the local architecture of Sanaa. With a degree from the U.K. in hand, he returned to Lebanon in 1979, ready to build in a country where the civil war and its destruction were well underway.
This irony was not lost on Elkoury. Rather than going to work in an architecture firm, he decided to go into the streets of Beirut with his camera and document the daily lives of the city and its people. “People call me a war photographer just because the first substantial work I did was covering the war. But I’m not a war photographer,” he says firmly.
Unlike the foreign correspondents who arrived in Beirut with a generous budget and stayed in hotels where there was electricity and running water, Elkoury photographed the West Beirut that was his home, venturing to other areas when there was a lull in fighting. He didn’t yet know photography would become his profession, he wasn’t affiliated with a press agency and he had no deadlines. He worked alone, never going to the front line where most photographers were because, he says, he was afraid — but also because he didn’t think the essence of the war was there.
“These foreigners would talk about scoops. I quickly realized this had no meaning. Therefore I settled for the backstage, taking a picture every day that would reflect what people were living. There was a hairdresser, who had lost his job and who took whatever he thought was necessary — the chair, the mirror — and installed them in the street. Or a guy who took an armchair and sat in it on the corniche with his machine gun, waiting, maybe, for the Israelis to come.”
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Elkoury photographed people’s circumstances and improbable moments during the civil war: a woman in a spotless white dress and heels carrying heavy bags at a crossing between the divided city’s two halves, a lush picnic in Baalbek when the fighting let up, a lone bread seller on a street near the port, children playing. He was the photographer on set for German filmmaker Volker Schloendorff’s 1981 film “Circle of Deceit,” shot in downtown Beirut with scenes of real warfare in the background. These images of Beirut before, during and after the Israeli invasion would be published in Elkoury’s first photography book, 1984’s “To Beirut and Back” (“Beyrouth Aller-Retour”).
The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon marked a sharp turn in the civil war and, by the end of the summer, an unexpected turning point in Elkoury’s career. On June 6, Israel invaded Lebanon with the aim of expelling the PLO and installing a pro-Israel Maronite Christian government. The Israeli army advanced quickly toward Beirut and laid siege to the city’s western half for two and a half months. As a chilling precursor to bombings of Gaza, the world watched on television screens as Israel attacked from air, land and sea, using phosphorus shells and hitting hospitals. Electricity was cut off, and water and food were scarce. An estimated 5,500 people in Beirut died. Most of the dead and wounded were civilians.
At the time, Elkoury was living on Bliss Street near the American University of Beirut with his brother Marwan, the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and the journalist and writer Selim Nassib. All three were involved in the Palestinian cause: Saab was reporting for French television and Nassib wrote for the French daily Liberation.
In an interview on Swiss television in 1999, Saab described the feelings the friends had as they documented the events in words and images: It was their way of defending their city against the Israelis. Although the siege was awful, she said, they felt they were living in harmony with their ideas by countering injustice and intolerance. Saab recalled that there wasn’t much to eat besides Picon processed cheese and sardines. Elkoury remembers eating only tuna and drinking tea.
Several days before the end of August 1982, Elkoury and his roommates heard a rumor that an agreement had been made and that the Palestinians, who had been protecting West Beirut, would be leaving. With his brother and a friend, he set out walking in the summer heat toward Barbir, the neighborhood where the PLO headquarters were based. It took them over an hour, he remembers: “There was so much destruction, so many dead bodies and terrible smells.” When they arrived, he asked PLO spokesperson Mahmoud Labadi what would happen to him and his roommates, both Christian and Jewish, if the PLO abandoned West Beirut, where they had been in control up to this point in the civil war. Labadi listened and disappeared for several hours. When he returned, he told Elkoury that he, his brother and friends would be brought military fatigues, boots and keffiyehs during the night and that they should be ready to leave alongside other Palestinian fighters. Labadi kept his promise.
Following a combination of Israeli military pressure and U.S. diplomacy, over 14,000 Palestinian fighters had already left Beirut, but on the morning of Aug. 30, the inhabitants of the apartment on Bliss Street found themselves on the Atlantis, a ship that Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou had sent to bring Yasser Arafat and 60 of his close companions and their families to Athens.
Elkoury says he still doesn’t know why he, his brother and his friends were among the lucky few to accompany Arafat’s memorable departure from Beirut. Saab, who had already filmed Arafat in her 1978 “A Letter from Beirut,” also said she didn’t know. Labadi, who additionally headed press relations in Beirut and knew all the foreign and local journalists, had most certainly been given the go-ahead from Arafat, who had lost a major battle and was looking for friends sympathetic to the cause.
Elkoury, a talented photographer from a privileged background; Saab, a filmmaker and reporter for French television and a renegade from the ruling Maronite milieu; and Nassib, a Jewish journalist reporting for a left-wing French daily, could doubtless be trusted to faithfully report on the PLO’s historic exit from Beirut.
The 44 hours they spent on the Atlantis were moments suspended in time. U.S. and French destroyers accompanied the ship on either side, and fighter jets flew overhead. But on the boat, it was a moment of respite for the passengers just coming out of the siege.
Elkoury began taking photos, rationing the eight rolls of film he had brought with him. Nassib interviewed Arafat for Liberation, while Marwan assisted Saab, who shot a documentary that would later become “The Ship of Exile” (“Le Bateau de l’Exil”). Elkoury’s serendipitous photographs of Arafat and his companions on the Atlantis marked a moment in history. When they disembarked at the port of Piraeus, all the photo agencies were there, and they all wanted to buy Elkoury’s pictures. Mentally and physically exhausted, Elkoury needed a steady job and working papers. The French photo agency Sygma hired him. “I had become a photographer,” he says.
Paris Match and Life magazines asked Elkoury for exclusive rights to the Atlantis photographs, but when the actress and princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly, died two weeks later, the event dominated the news, and the Atlantis photographs were never published.
Elkoury settled in Paris but resigned from Sygma after a year, as he understood he wasn’t suited to be a reporter. He found another agency, Rapho, that he felt was closer to the work he aspired to do — photographs that were thought-provoking and conveyed emotion. One of the oldest agencies in France, Rapho’s legendary photographers included Robert Doisneau, Sabine Weiss and Willy Ronis.
In the late 1980s, Elkoury received a grant from the National Library of France for a photographic project in Egypt revisiting a trip that French photographer Maxime du Camp and author Gustave Flaubert made in 1849 and 1850. Elkoury traveled through Egypt for two years, driving along the Nile. With great difficulty, he found one of the villages that Flaubert had described as beautiful, now in ruins. It was then that he recognized that destruction can be beautiful — a concept that has disturbed him ever since.
When he returned to Paris, his work was exhibited and became a book called “Egyptian Series” (“Suite Egyptienne”), published in 1999. Although Elkoury’s photography had gained considerable recognition, “There was always doubt, always questioning. When you’re not in a position to have your work seen day after day, every moment is a struggle. You have to find the resources within yourself to go on, and it’s a constant battle with yourself. So many photographers left the profession. But I loved photography so much that I didn’t want to leave it.”
Just as Elkoury was wondering what to do next, Lebanese writer Dominique Edde asked his advice for a photography project she was organizing in Beirut. The 15-year civil war had just ended, and Edde wanted leading photographers to document the ravaged city center. Three Magnum photographers, Josef Koudelka, Rene Burri and Raymond Depardon, were invited along with Gabriele Basilico and Robert Frank. Elkoury didn’t think he would be included in the group, but he became the project’s sixth photographer. At the time, he was considerably younger than some of the photographers and the only “local.”
Edde rented a flat for the photographers and during the day they made their headquarters in a lone cafe amid the ruins, missing windows and a door. Elkoury recalls that people set adrift by the war, the penniless and the homeless, were also among the cafe’s customers.
“When I arrived, I was more terrified than all the foreign photographers,” he says. At first, he was “paralyzed by fear and by the fact that I had to do as well as all these big names.” After a couple of weeks, he came up with a plan that was similar to how he had approached the civil war. “It was about how life survived in such a city. I would trace the vegetation, or water amidst the stones.” He remembered the remains of the village in Egypt and thought that he didn’t want the Beirut ruins to look so good. “I wanted to find a way of showing the destruction without it just being beautiful.”
One rainy day, he was alone with Robert Frank and asked him where he wanted to go. Frank said he wanted to look for traces of love. “He killed me with this word. But off we went looking for traces of love.” They ventured beyond the perimeter assigned to them by Edde and found themselves on Damascus Street. “Everything was destroyed. There was a boy on crutches who came to say hello to us because seeing a foreigner or any human being at the time was a moment of joy. When he said hello to Robert, Robert took his hand and opened it. On his palm there was a tattoo that said ‘love.’”
The extraordinary body of work produced by the photographers portrayed a unique moment. The collection was published in the 1992 book “Beirut City Centre” and included 40 four-color plates and 90 black-and-white plates. No longer in print, resellers often price the book at $2,000.
When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Elkoury was given several commissions, among them one from Paris Match — then France’s most prestigious magazine for photojournalism — to photograph Palestinians. For two years, he shuttled back and forth to the West Bank and Gaza. He hadn’t realized how enclosed and restricted the Palestinians’ world was, and he hoped his photographs would convince people to see Palestinians in a new light. “When I came back with photos of Palestinians in schools or at home, they saw these pictures of human beings as normal people, and they decided not to publish them. Even though there was the Oslo Agreement, I think they didn’t want to see them as normal people.”
A series shot in Deir el Balah in Gaza called “End of the Road” symbolized for him the failure of the peace accords. On a portion of the road along the sea that had been disrupted by a former Israeli checkpoint, the asphalt had eroded, and it had become an island of sorts atop the dirt road. He later published his photographs of fishers in Gaza, children playing, or women hanging laundry in his 1996 book “Palestine, the Other Side of the Mirror” (“Palestine, l’Envers du Miroir”).
In 2019, Elkoury made a short film called “Nothing to Lose,” in which he reflects on the story of Palestine, the loss of his mother, the loss of a beloved and the loss of convictions. In the film, he narrates:
Their land is speckled by colonies. The Palestinians lost it. After decades of occupation, colonization, rejection and lies, they’re left landlocked, bound by walls, or fleeing in clumps like tufts of hair after a long illness. It took courage to resist. To watch their children die. It’ll take much more courage to accept their defeat. Gaza is a machine that obliterates dreams. Even their struggle has become impossible. They hurled stones, burnt tires, dug tunnels. Only to see the noose getting tighter at every turn. So, they signed peace treaties. No more than ink on paper. As they reached the border for the March of Return, Israel greeted them with gunfire.
This pessimism had roots in his disappointment over the power of photography. When he began photographing in the West Bank and in Gaza, he was galvanized by the idea that he could change the way people saw Palestinians. His realization that his photographs didn’t have the power to change public opinion was a great source of disillusionment to him.
Elkoury’s work has always been poetic, whether in images or writing, and he has combined photography with writing for years. In the challenging subjects he has taken on, he has been ever-conscious of finding beauty and singularity in his mode of expression. He speaks often of his fear — during wars or of the mukhabarat (secret police) when taking photos in the Syria of the 1980s or ’90s — yet he has always strayed from the beaten path. He is unafraid of expressing his emotions, which are just under the surface, as if he might smile suddenly or cry at any moment.
Although intensely private, in his films and books he reveals intimate themes of his life, such as separation, his children, illness or falling in love. “I don’t see why intimacy should be personal,” Elkoury says, adding: “There are many things in life that were given to me by my parents or teachers in school, that when I thought about it, I didn’t believe they applied to me.”
During the 33-day Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, which included a ground invasion and relentless bombings of Beirut’s southern suburbs, the woman Elkoury loved was considering leaving him. His photographs and film “On War and Love” juxtapose political and personal crises: sleepless nights during bombings, his journey out of Lebanon, his subsequent meeting with the woman in Istanbul, their tears, their moments watching the news about Lebanon together.
Elkoury has also been involved in the cultural life of Beirut and the greater Middle East. In 1997, with fellow photographers and artists Samer Mohdad and Akram Zaatari, Elkoury founded the Arab Image Foundation, which aims to preserve, exhibit and study photographs from the MENA region and the Arab diaspora from the 19th century to the present day. In 2008, Elkoury was also one of the co-founders of the Arab Center for Architecture, which focuses on urban planning, architecture and design in the Arab world. In 2017, following his move back to Lebanon from France, he founded the Mina Image Centre, which was dedicated to photography in the Middle East. Today, Elkoury is no longer involved with these organizations, and the Mina Image Centre is closed.
The August 2020 port explosion in Beirut was a critical juncture for Elkoury, both personally and professionally. The Mina Image Centre was by the port and was destroyed, as was his home in the nearby Gemmayze neighborhood, where he nearly died. “I escaped death less than 10 times but more than five,” he says. “Maybe because of my age, it was the time I had the strongest feeling that I would have liked not to survive. It took me three months to open my eyes. It’s an accumulation of things. Every time I’ve been through a cycle of violence, all these moments of extreme suffering, you come out of them in different ways.”
Elkoury moved to land owned by his family in the mountains and is now learning to farm. He bought a donkey, because it takes 20 minutes to walk from one end of the property to another. “I live among flowers and rocks and trees and valleys and birds and I have discovered nature can be soothing and can erase trauma. I have directed my camera to collect a ray of light on a tree or branch and I no longer take pictures of people. It was as if I needed this calm to balance my past life, which was full of danger and violence.”
Each day he corresponds with the deputy editor-in-chief of Liberation, to whom he sends reflections on the Middle East, taking great pleasure in the exercise of writing. He has a book planned and is working on two films. He has added “farmer” to his list of professions. “In agriculture, things are so beautiful,” he says.
A 2022 documentary on Elkoury by Kami Pakdel begins in Paris, where Elkoury keeps his meticulous photographic archives. Throughout the film, he revisits photographs he has taken and recalls projects he loved working on, such as his first trip along the Nile. He also recalls photographs, like those he took in Palestine, that he thought could change the world and didn’t. He examines contact sheets and finds new details in his images, or wonders why he chose certain photographs over others.
Elkoury will return to his mountain in Lebanon, but he worries that Israel now has the power to intervene in Syria, Palestine or Lebanon whenever it wants. He doesn’t believe that Israel will stop its bombardments until it destroys the nuclear facilities in Iran.
There has been a common thread throughout his life and career that he says he would like to underline: “As I stand before you, it seems as if my life has been a succession of things coming at the right time, opening onto one another in a very logical, natural way. But every single day has been a struggle, with permanent interrogation, questioning and doubt.”
From the New Lines Magazine website.
